174
SECTION 2
PROCESSES
Jacobs, F. Robert, Richad B. Chase & Jaydeep Balakrishnan. Operations & Supply chain Management
- The Core - Canadian Edition. McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 2010. ISBN: 9780070969070. 448 pages.
CASE 1
II
Kristen’s Cookie Company (A)
You and your roommate are preparing to start Kristen’s
Cookie Company in your on-campus apartment. The company
will provide fresh cookies to starving students late at night.
You need to evaluate the preliminary design for the company’s
production process to figure out many variables there are,
including what prices to charge, whether you will be able to
make a profit, and how many orders to accept.
Second, like Steve’s Ice Cream,5 you will have a variety of
ingredients available to add to the basic dough, including choc­
olate chips, M&M’s, Crispy Crunch bars, coconut, walnuts,
and raisins. Buyers will telephone in their orders and specify
which of these ingredients they want in their cookies. You
guarantee completely fresh cookies. In short, you will have the
freshest, most exotic cookies anywhere, available right on
campus.
Business Concept
Your idea is to bake fresh cookies to order, using any combi­
nation of ingredients that the buyer wants. The cookies will be
ready for pickup at your apartment within an hour.
Several factors will set you apart from competing products
such as store-bought cookies. First, your cookies will be com­
pletely fresh. You will not bake any cookies before receiving
the order; therefore, the buyer will be getting cookies that are
literally hot out of the oven.
The Production Process
Baking cookies is simple: mix all the ingredients in a food
processor; spoon out the cookie dough onto a tray; put the
cookies into the oven; bake them; take the tray of cookies out
of the oven; let the cookies cool; and, finally, take the cookies
off the tray and carefully pack them in a box. You and your
roommate already own all the necessary capital equipment:
one food processor, cookie sheets, and spoons. Your apartment
CHAPTER 6
has a small oven that will hold one tray at a time. Your land­
lord pays for all the electricity. The variable costs, therefore,
are merely the cost of t le ingredients (estimated to be $0.60/
dozen), the cost of the box in which the cookies are packed
($0.10 per box; each box holds a dozen cookies), and your time
(what value do you place on your time?).
A detailed examination of the production process, which
specifies how long each of the steps will take, follows. The first
step is to take an order, which your roommate has figured out
how to do quickly and with 100 percent accuracy. (Actually,
you and your roommate devised a method using the Internet to
accept orders and to inform customers when their orders will
be ready for pickup. Because this runs automatically on your
personal computer, it does not take any of your time.) There­
fore, this step will be ignored in further analysis.
You and your roommate have timed the necessary physical
operations. The first physical production step is to wash out the
mixing bowl from the previous batch, add all of the ingredients,
and mix them in your food processor. The mixing bowls hold
ingredients for up to three dozen cookies. You then dish up the
cookies, one dozen at a time, onto a cookie tray. These activities
take six minutes for the washing and mixing steps, regardless of
how many cookies are being made in the batch. That is, to mix
enough dough and ingredients for two dozen cookies takes the
same six minutes as one dozen cookies. However, dishing up
the cookies onto the sheet takes two minutes per sheet.
The next step, performed by your roommate, is to put the
cookies in the oven and set the thermostat and timer, which
takes about one minute. The cookies bake for the next nine
minutes. So total baking time is 10 minutes, during the first
minute of which your roommate is busy setting the oven. Be­
cause the oven holds only one cookie sheet, a second dozen
take an additional 10 minutes to bake.
Your roommate also performs the last steps of the process
by first removing the cookies from the oven and putting them
aside to cool for five minutes, then carefully packing them in a
box and accepting payment. Removing the cookies from the
oven takes only a negligible amount of time, but it must be
done promptly. It takes two minutes to pack each dozen and
about one minute to accept payment for the order.
That is the process for producing cookies by the dozen in
Kristen’s Cookie Company. As experienced bakers know, a
few simplifications were made in the actual cookie production
process. For example, the first batch of cookies for the night
requires preheating the oven. However, such complexities will
be put aside for now. Begin your analysis by developing a
process flow diagram of the cookie-making process.
Key Questions to Answer Before You
Launch the Business
To launch the business, you need to set prices and rules for
accepting orders. Some issues will be resolved only after you
get started and try out different ways of producing the cookies.
P ro c e ss A n a lysis
175
Before you start, however, you at least want a preliminary plan,
with as much as possible specified, so that you can do a careful
calculation of how much time you will have to devote to this
business each night, and how much money you can expect
to make. For example, when you conduct a market survey to
determine the likely demand, you will want to specify exactly
what your order policies will be. Therefore, answering the
following operational questions should help you:
1. How long will it take you to fill an order?
2. How many orders can you fill in a night, assuming you are
open four hours each night?
3. How much of your own and your roommate’s valuable
time will it take to fill each order?
4. Because your cookie sheets can hold exactly one dozen
cookies, you will produce and sell cookies by the dozen.
Should you give any discount for people who order two
dozen cookies, three dozen cookies, or more? If so, how
much? Will it take you any longer to fill a two-dozen
cookie order than a one-dozen cookie order?
5. How many food processors and cookie sheets will you
need?
6. Are there any changes you can make in your production plans
that will allow you to make better cookies, or more cookies in
less time or at lower cost? For example, is there a bottleneck
operation in your production process that you can expand
cheaply? What is the effect of adding another oven? How
much would you be willing to pay to rent an additional oven?
Questions
1. What happens if you are trying to do this by yourself with­
out a roommate?
2. Should you offer special rates for rush orders? Suppose
you have just put a sheet of cookies into the oven and
someone calls up with a “crash priority” order for a dozen
cookies of a different flavour. Can you fill the priority
order while still fulfilling the order for the cookies that are
already in the oven? If not, how much of a premium should
you charge for filling the rush order?
3. When should you promise delivery? How can you look
quickly at your order board (list of pending orders) and tell
a caller when his or her order will be ready? How much of
a safety margin for timing should you allow?
4. What other factors should you consider at this stage of
planning your business?
5. Your product must be made to order because each order is
potentially unique. If you decide to sell standard cookies
instead, how should you change the production system?
The order-taking process?
Source Kristen’s Cookie Company (A), Case 9 686-093, Wntten by Roger
Bohn. Copyright © 1986 by The Harvard Business School Publishing Corpora­
tion All Rights Reserved.